Ramen, Japanese-style Chinese noodles, is undoubtedly one of the most famous Japanese meals among tourists visiting Japan. Although it originated in Chinese noodles, ramen chefs have modified and developed it for many years to make it original Japanese noodles and soup. It represents that accepting, absorbing, modifying, and improving anything into something unique and more sophisticated is one of the splendid characteristics of Japanese craftsmanship.
These days, I have seen many Instagram posts where tourists proudly enjoy ramen at the ramen shop’s counter. But they also have a problem: a long queue where they must wait until their turn. It often takes more than thirty minutes, sometimes longer than an hour. Time-saving is the most viral issue for them because visitors to Tokyo usually spend two to three nights there and make a great effort to go all over Tokyo. You might line up in front of one of the ramen shops on your bucket list to savor ramen in soy sauce base soup, but you cannot afford the time to visit another one for miso soup ramen. You’ll be in a dilemma, I guess.
Then, I suggest that you go to a convenience store and find frozen ramen in the freezer. You can enjoy more types of ramen at your hotel or even inside a convenience store such as Seven-Eleven, Lawson, and Family Mart. Frozen ramen costs less than 300 yen!
These days, frozen technology has developed dramatically. Many frozen meals taste similar to the original ones. About ten years ago, we had no choice but to eat instant cup ramen, which involved dried noodles and ingredients, adding hot water, and waiting three minutes. It tastes good enough, but something strange is the texture of the noodles—sometimes too hard, other times too soft, something like that. However, defrosted, heated, and cooked noodles in the microwave oven materialize in a similar texture and hardness to one served at a ramen shop. Let’s try some frozen ramen from the shelves in the freezer at the convenience store.
There are two types of frozen ramen: one packaged in a bag and another packed in a plastic bowl. If you have a microwave oven, kettle, and tableware, like bowls, plates, forks, chopsticks, etc., in your accommodation, I recommend you go to the Lawson or Family Mart convenience store, which sells frozen ramen packed in a freezer bag.
You don’t need to worry about instructions only in Japanese on the back. You can read them using the Google Translation App with Google Lens. The left is the original instruction in Japanese, and the right is translated through Google Lens and Translation on my iPhone. You can understand what you should do. Anyway, I translate them into English. It is the instruction for Lawson’s frozen ramen. The time and watt in the bracket are for Family Mart’s one.
1) Remove the noodles wrapped in the inner plastic bag and a packet of condensed soup from the outer package.
2) Prepare hot water in the kettle.
3) Don’t remove the wrap of the noodles. Heat frozen noodles topped with ingredients in the wrap in the microwave oven for 5 minutes at 500W or 4miutes 30 seconds at 600W. (4 minutes 40 seconds at 500W, 4 minutes at 600W)
4) Pour the condensed soup and 300ml of hot water into the bowl.
5) Put the heated noodles and ingredients in the soup.
6) Enjoy yourself!!
If your hotel room doesn’t have a microwave oven, kettle, and tableware, you should go straight to a Seven-Eleven shop with eat-in space. Seven-Eleven sells ready-to-eat frozen ramen. Find the following frozen ramen in the freezer, bring it to the cashier counter, and pay for it first. Then, ask the shop staff to heat it in a microwave oven. He or she puts it in the microwave oven behind the counter and cooks it for you. You take the hot ramen bowl to the eat-in space. That’s all! Please help yourself.
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